


Nothing gold can stay

by Spylace



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Supernatural, Character Death Fix, Crossroads Deals & Demons, F/M, Gen, Star Trek: Into Darkness Spoilers, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 04:13:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/857634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, McCoy has not the hands of God and cannot save Jim. </p><p>So he finds someone who can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing gold can stay

**Author's Note:**

> **Spoilers for STID

_“Can you beam somebody down?”_

He tells Spock, he doesn’t recall what exactly he tells Spock, but he tells Spock to stay with Jim, guard him, for god sake man, don’t let anyone see him.

At once the Vulcan looks baffled and enraged, his human half drowning in a sea of loss and grief. He knows the feeling well and that’s why Spock has to stay, he doesn’t trust anyone else to do it. Spock can argue until he’s blue in the face and it won’t matter a tick. Time’s a wasting and he has to go. He won’t let anyone else to do it for him.

McCoy ends up on an abandoned patch of highway heading west from east towards the untouched frontier everyone wants to claim. Gravel crunches beneath his boots, thistles and sagebrush stirring in his wake. He doesn’t even need the box anymore, filled with cat bones and graveyard dirt. When the road ends, he picks a direction and walks.

He remembers the first time he met Jim, on the shuttle, his corn-fed blue eyes widening in recognition of what he was, what they both were. They were two of a kind and they knew it, that’s why they stuck together even though he sometimes wishes that it was different. But he knows that anyone else would have reported him as insane or just plain psychotic when he started sprinkling salt against the doorway and carved a devil’s trap in the ceiling.

Pamela is there, straddling the horizon, prim and pretty in her hat and sundress like she’s about to go into town. She’s like a glass of water for a thirsty man, as refreshing as sweet tea. Those were simpler times, the better times, the time the world forgot because he’s sure as hell too old to start all over again and hell don’t beat it all if Jim’s eyes don’t follow him worse than his ex-wife’s.

The demon in his wife laughs gaily when she sees him, her throat done up in cream lace. “Fancy meeting you here Len. Whatever happened to ‘I’ll see you in hell’?”

There are many things he wants to say to her; no doubt she already knows all of it. He wants to ask, was it worth it? Was she okay? How was her body holding? How’s _life_? But he clears his throat and looks away, his throat parched and suddenly too dry to force sounds through.

Pamela—no, not really, stares at him through her long eyelashes, amber gold when her hair falls in dark ringlets around her face. She tilts her head, graceful yet strangely alien in her movements. His wife, a demon, a living body bag.

“Well darlin’, ah already have your life, your memories, and even your wife! What could you possibly have left to offer?”

He doesn’t have much, that’s true. What he has to his name would make a Ferengi laugh. But it was never material goods demons looked for, they wanted something more. They wanted it to hurt so when the pain eased, they could twist the knife in that much further.

Leonard McCoy is a doctor, went to medical school at a precocious age. But what the files don’t say is what happened between those intervening years between graduation and his disastrous divorce. The files don’t say that he took up the family business, protecting people, hunting things and losing the ones he loved most.

Pamela tosses her head back dramatically as though in affront, a woman jilted, cheated on but willing to be appeased. A demon who is amused, tempted and gloating over the victory foretold. “All this for one person? Who is it? I’m jealous.”

“A friend” he answers because kisses snatched in the dark can’t be anything but. “His name is Jim. I want you to bring him back.”

She smiles like she pities him, like she’s dealing with some dumb hick and not a promising young doctor-turned-hunter-turned doctor. He wishes that he had some firewhisky in his guts or some Saurian Rum, something to bolster his courage when he has none, when he just wants to get back to the ship, shuttles and teleportation beam be damned and hope that maybe the blood of seventy-three souls will take.

But he can’t go back, he’s strayed too far. He swore never to come back for this life, to demons, to the occult, things that people would rather laugh away as myths or child’s imagination, things that Spock would deem irrational in his logical view of the world.

“Nuh uh baby, that’s not how this works.” Her eyes bleed to black. “You have to sweeten the pot.”

Pamela bites his lip, searing an irreversible mark on his soul. This was his life once upon a time, sure as the sky is blue and peach cobbler is sweet. Somewhere in the atmosphere, Jim is taking his first breath. He’ll know what happened even if Spock doesn’t tell him.

“I still love you.” He says desperately, cupping her face, searching for the woman he loved one upon a time, a woman he loves still. Pamela croons from her human shell, her fingers carding behind his ears to pull him close. She smells like sulfur underneath the perfume. He can see his death written in her ink-colored eyes.

“Sweetheart, never change.”

**Author's Note:**

> Weird things happen when I think about McCoy. Like this for instance. 
> 
> In my head, McCoy gets the requisite 10 years. That's when xenopolycythemia kicks in because his ex-wife thought hellhounds weren't good enough D:


End file.
